I didn't really have any huge issue with either the old radeon or even proprietary fglrx drivers back in the day, and it's not that nVidia's are broken or unworkable (unless you like to keep up with kernel development)... but AMD invested a ton into mainlining the amdgpu drivers, while nVidia still refuses to release the firmware that would allow nouveau to enable reclocking.

Any other system builder targeting Windows, sure, nVidia is more popular. But for a Linux-first integrator pushing for openness, it's just odd to me to not even offer the equivalent hardware that doesn't require a binary blob. I'm not even saying not to sell or even default to nVidia if that's what they want, but I suppose there might be a way to sweet talk them into letting you order a GPU-less system and then BYO card.

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It still baffles me that they're only offering various nVidia GPUs for their desktops - aside from the fact that no one seems to have much stock of anything, this is right up my alley of 'I would like to replace my aging desktop with something that supports Linux out of the box better'. I used to have a 1st and 2nd-gen Mac Pro tower, and those cases were amazing to work in by standards of the day.

Even if the Radeon options were just greyed out for now with 'out of stock', it's just so odd to push for openness everywhere else in the system...and then only offer nVidia's binary-blob-driver cards as GPUs.

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On the whole 'oh, it's an old PowerPC 750 on Perserverance', yes.

It's an extremely radiation hardened, military grade PPC750 (aka what Apple would call a 'G3'), and it's the same as previous Mars rovers and a number of I believe orbiters, other missions, etc.

Reliability in deep space is a huge concern, radiation is a huge deal (remember the 'cosmic ray bit flips'?), and it's a now heavily tested platform. I can't fault them for going with what they know has a well proven track record and reusing previous rover tech. Same reason it's VxWorks instead of Linux.

But yeah, it's not as dense as a modern (ish) Snapdragon 801 ARM SoC from 2014, and for a specific experiment where the performance/watt...per gram is a make-or-break, and even its potential for failure doesn't affect the main rover, it makes sense.

VxWorks isn't available for the Snapdragon 801, apparently, hence Linux, and here we are.

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Quoting: psycho_driver

Quoting: KithopBut for a vocal 0.1% running that Frankenstein's monster of a tricked out Gentoo build?

Hey, why'd you have to bring me into this conversation?

Seriously though, I don't think I've ever complained about a game not working on my distro. The only game I can even think of that I just couldn't get to work at all that a lot of other people didn't seem to be having problems with was Payday.

:whistle: *eyes his own distro icon* I, uh, joke from a place of love.

And personal experience. :grin:

Heck my issues with probably whatever the heck I've done to my system in Gentoo are just... Wayland + Qt being a butt and disappearing context/menu bar menus instantly, keeping me on X11 for now. But that's fine... it's fine... fine!...

*starts adding various -9999 ** entries to package.accept_keywords and compiling from git HEAD in the hopes of maybe the bug being fixed*

...fine...all fine...

(this is the price I pay for wanting to avoid systemd like the plague, I guess)

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Personally, a small group of friends and I had, up to recently, mostly been playing Empyrion: Galactic Survival [External Link], which, while not a native Linux game, runs basically flawlessly [External Link] via Proton, with the usual anti-cheat issues (I host my own server for it, begrudgingly, on a Windows Server VM that I keep around for such situations). Unfortunately, their latest update started causing some very strange issues with blocks being replaced when you weren't looking with ones that shouldn't even fit (e.g. the cockpit of a Small Vessel turning into a Capital Vessel double-door... but at teeny tiny scale), I think related to spawning in blueprints.

Since we didn't want to risk screwing things up any further, we've shelved that one for now to give them time to hopefully identify & hotfix.

Instead, we've gone back to 7 Days to Die [External Link], which does have native Linux builds of not just the dedicated server (again, running my own), but the client as well (interestingly, I believe both Empryion and 7D2D are Unity games, but only the latter has native builds). Interestingly, it looks like as of the combo of 'my weird bleeding edge Gentoo setup', 'actually working AMDGPU drivers now that I've switched away from nVidia', and the current game build of A19.3, the 'not fully implemented yet' Vulkan renderer (via the 'Show game launcher' option when starting) seems to be working like a champ for me, and gives me way better/more stable frame rates over OpenGL.

One note, if you have multiple GPUs like, say, an onboard Intel iGPU as well, you may need to edit the Command Line Options in Steam for 7D2D and include something like:

Spoiler, click me

export VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/radeon_icd.i686.json:/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/radeon_icd.x86_64.json; %command%
or, in my case, adding in MangoHud [External Link] and suspending KDE Plasma's compositor:
export MANGOHUD=1; export VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/radeon_icd.i686.json:/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/radeon_icd.x86_64.json; qdbus org.kde.KWin /Compositor suspend;mangohud %command%;qdbus org.kde.KWin /Compositor resume
the 'export MANGOHUD=1' and running 'mangohud %command%' are likely redundant, but I seem to remember one of them covers the OpenGL use case and the other Vulkan, so having both means you can switch back and forth for testing without editing this again.

I used NitroGen [External Link] to create a custom map per my friend's request: 'a lot of big cities'...


Embiggen Map [External Link]

In addition to our core 4-player team, we ended up bringing in another 3 or 4 of our friends, and their friends, who had either never played the game at all before, or at least had less than 10 hours in it (I'm personally just over 200 hours in, while it's my friend's partner's favourite game, and they have over 1000 hours and counting), and we've had a... blast... taking over a military camp PoI that spawns surrounded by landmines and turning its underground bunker into our home. Playing with 7-8 people at once is... an exercise in coordination, for sure, but it's hilarious hearing the new players' reactions to certain jump scares in PoIs we've been to plenty of times, seeing certain enemies for the first time, etc.

After stints in previous playthroughs as the 'heavy armour + shotgun in a concrete pillbox / mining' guy and the 'stays at home and ascends the Intelligence tech tree to make vehicles, traps, and other cool shit' guy, I think I've settled on going for the oft-maligned Agility tree, because the Parkour skill (higher jump height, less fall damage, immune to breaking your legs, etc.) is just... too fun. On horde nights, my job is basically to run around and kite dozens of zombies back and forth just outside our walls so our snipers can pick them off without getting harassed as much. Cue Yakety Sax [External Link].

Between 7 Days to Die sessions, I like to mess around with the Paradox Grand Strategy games, like Hearts of Iron IV [External Link] (also native Linux builds and basically flawless ones at that!), or even good old modded Minecraft, leveraging MultiMC [External Link] to manage various modpacks and, again, hosting my own server(s) as needed - though that's on my FreeBSD system directly in Java of course.

Games I've poked at and want to come back to when our current 7D2D stint is up include Raft [External Link] (also flawless via Proton) [External Link], Satisfactory [External Link] (again, great with Proton [External Link], though you may want to look up how to increase network usage/bandwidth caps for multiplayer) [External Link], Eco [External Link], and of course, Stardew Valley [External Link].

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The #1 reason why Stadia != Desktop Linux, in terms of support? It's, well, support.

Stadia build has a bug because of the peculiarities of their specific hardware/distro/etc. combo? Google could help the dev fix it, or the dev can at least reproduce it easily, because of the console-like nature.

Desktop Linux? Oh, that bug only applies to people running... say Manjaro, who have this specific nVidia driver and kernel version. When the moon is full. On Sundays only. But damn if the people affected aren't going to complain, refund, etc. and tarnish your game's reputation for being buggy.

People are more accepting of a weird Windows glitch messing things up, and with more people running it, there's more incentive for a dev to squash bugs that could be affecting 20% of their players. But for a vocal 0.1% running that Frankenstein's monster of a tricked out Gentoo build? Not only do they likely have no hope of reproducing the environment, they likely can't afford the time to care.

How many times have we heard the 'dev drops/abandons Linux build because they can't support it' song and dance, now?

Stadia may have the tools and trappings of a Desktop Linux distro under the hood, but it's a single, console-like platform with a huge corporate behemoth and technical expertise behind it. Only Valve and the Steam Linux Runtime are sort of close in scope, but even using that specific set of libraries doesn't help if things like kernel drivers suck. Only devs who are committed to the ideal really stick it out.

It's better than it was, even 5-10 years ago, sure, but 'Linux' as a platform is way more complicated and fragmented than even Windows is, let alone a standardized, console-like environment, regardless if it's Stadia, or say, PS4/5 (BSD + OpenGL and Vulkan)

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Quoting: Purple Library GuySecond, Stadia itself, at the server level, is Linux. That means:
2a) For a game to be on Stadia, developers had to develop it on Linux and
2b) The game has to be, somewhere out there, running on Linux.

Counterpoint: Android runs on Linux, but the development is so different that it's not like we see a bunch of Android <-> Linux cross-ports outside of things that started life on the Linux side.
The PS4/PS5 and Apple ecosystems are all underpinned by BSD, and I certainly don't see a ton of FreeBSD-native games.

Just because Stadia 'runs on Linux/Vulkan' doesn't necessarily mean that it's not also abstracted to heck on top of that. Could be something like Proton, or just another iOS/PS OS ecosystem style layer on top. Just because it's running the Linux kernel + video drivers doesn't mean it's 1:1 with your typical desktop Linux solution in terms of the libraries and things game devs are focused on.

'Stadia means Linux-native games' is of the same caliber as 'Android means Linux-native games', IMO. Technically correct (the best kind of correct!), but not what most of us here are hoping for, I feel.

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Paying a monthly fee for access to something and then full price for the games on top, that you could lose access to any moment (if Google shuts Stadia down), vs. MS' finance-an-Xbox initiative where you get their amazing Game Pass deal, to boot (in the US, anyway), and you get to keep the Xbox after it's paid off?

I want more Gaming on Linux, but Stadia isn't it, for me, and MS is way more entrenched, with the better deal, unfortunately.

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I still haven't quite figured out what causes my menus/drop downs to instantly disappear the moment I click them, but still have their options selectable if I click on the right empty space, in every Qt5 app running under Plasma on Wayland. (totally fine under Xorg) I even switched to building from master/head for the KDE part, but I'm suspecting this is a config/driver thing (Radeon RX 580) or a Qt5 thing.

The joys of running Gentoo, I guess. ;p I'll either find a Qt5 upstream ebuild overlay (i.e. a -9999) and try that or just wait and see. Other than that, though, Wayland support is looking solid!

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Quoting: BoldosApologies, I was not specific enough:
By "available directly in EU" I meant if they are sold directly in EU.
What you confirm is they "ship" into EU, but that technically means "import", so we have to pay VAT and customs fees. And that makes it painfully expensive....

Ah, okay - that makes sense. I don't know much about them, but Tuxedo Computers [External Link] appears to be based out of Germany, and at first glance sounds like kind of the same idea?

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